Originally added by Rachel

So I’m a bookseller for a living. Generally I love it–it’s one of those jobs you fall into to pay the rent as a starving English major and for some people, like me, it becomes an obsession. Er, career, I think they call it. But sometimes bookselling makes you feel dirty.

This week is one of those weeks. And it’s because of two books. One good book, one bad book. And it’s all making me feel ugly.

The good book? The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron just won the Newberry Award. Yay for it. So what’s the problem? Well, there is no problem, as far as I’m concerned. But to some people, the fact that it uses the word “scrotum” on the first page disqualifies it as a kid’s book altogether.

Sigh.

Yes, evidently, parents (or god forbid, teachers) cannot possibly explain to their 9-12 year old children what a scrotum is. Evidently scrotums are evil. Dog scrotums included, since the scrotum in question does in fact belong to a dog. A DOG, people! A dog. Dogs are not even required by law to cover their scrotums in public. Yet. Check with me again in a few years on that one. I have a feeling some new legislation just might be in works.

The bad book? Well, I’m sure there have been worse. In my stint at a self-help bookstore, I sold some doozies. But this one went on Oprah, and now everybody must have one, and it’s, well, dumb. Let me quote liberally from Dwight Garner of the New York Times, who I think put it best:

There are good self-help books and bad self-help books. But once in a while one comes along that’s so comically and so brazenly cynical and manipulative that it produces a kind of inverse sonic boom — you can practically hear the sound of shattered bookstore windows rippling up and down the coasts. Picking it up, you know you’re in the presence of demented genius. And you know, somehow, it’s going to sell. Such a book is ”The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne — No. 3 on the hardcover advice list. ”The Secret” has a faux-antiquated ”Da Vinci Code” look and comes on like a Great Books seminar for the feeble-minded (”Fragments of a Great Secret,” the jacket copy intones, ”have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies”) or a Bill Moyers PBS special produced by superstitious elves. Byrne’s book promises, as many do, to help you zero in on ”the hidden, untapped power” that’s somewhere inside you. But to get at this ”secret” to success and well-being, you need to flip through so many pages of world-class inanities (”You are the most powerful transmission tower in the Universe,” ”Visualize checks in the mail,” ”Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can”) that you begin to think the author is in on the joke and that you’re finally reading the self-help version of ”This Is Spinal Tap.” No such luck. And the ”secret,” it turns out, isn’t much more than ”The Power of Positive Thinking” breaded with hokum and deep-fried. Visualize checks in the mail? I’m going to visualize people doing better things — buying the new Jim Harrison novel? going to the zoo? — with their $23.95.

So, to sum up, while people are actively censoring what seems like a great kid’s book, quite possibly the most condescending book ever written is being treated like the solution to world hunger. I hate everybody.

A random poem, because it makes me feel better:

Untitled, by Kate Knapp Johnson

It is not white. Cannot
float. It doesn’t think there are so many
flowers in this garden.
It is the iron darkness
from inside. Honest, but liable
to snag in the enemy’s fat hand.
It’s the goat, shivering dog, bad
girl. The unwanted,
Different. It is anything
different.

What is the soul? Shame,
they said. You should be ashamed.

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